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Man on death row for 26 years walks free

Glenn Ford had been on death row in Louisiana since 1988 for a murder his lawyers say someone else has confessed to

March 12, 20148:15AM ET

The entrance to the Louisiana State PenitentiaryJudi Bottoni/AP

A man who spent nearly 26 years on death row in Louisiana walked free Tuesday, hours after a judge approved the state's motion to vacate the man's murder conviction in the 1983 killing of a jeweler.

Glenn Ford, 64, had been on death row since August 1988 in connection with the death of 56-year-old Isadore Rozeman, a Shreveport jeweler and watchmaker for whom Ford had done occasional yard work. Convicted of first-degree murder by an all-white jury, Ford, who is African-American, had always denied killing Rozeman.

Ford walked out the maximum security prison at Angola on Tuesday afternoon, said Pam Laborde, a spokeswoman for Louisiana's Department of Public Safety and Corrections.

Asked about his release, Ford told WAFB-TV, "It feels good; my mind is going in all kind of directions. It feels good."

Ford told the outlet he harbors some resentment at being wrongly jailed: "Yeah, cause I've been locked up almost 30 years for something I didn't do."

"I can't go back and do anything I should have been doing when I was 35, 38, 40, stuff like that," he added.

State District Judge Ramona Emanuel on Monday took the step of voiding Ford's conviction and sentence, saying it was based on new information that corroborated his claim that he was not involved in Rozeman's death, or even at the scene of the crime, Ford's attorneys said.

Gary Clements, one of Ford’s lawyers, told Al Jazeera that the new information was a confession from another suspect in Rozeman’s murder.

"We are very pleased to see Glenn Ford finally exonerated, and we are particularly grateful that the prosecution and the court moved ahead so decisively to set Mr. Ford free," read a statement from Clements and Aaron Novod, another attorney for Ford from the Capital Post Conviction Project of Louisiana.

They said Ford's trial had been "profoundly compromised by inexperienced counsel and by the unconstitutional suppression of evidence, including information from an informant." They also cited what they said was a suppressed police report related to the time of the crime and evidence involving the murder weapon.

Currently, there are 83 men and two women on death row in Louisiana, according to Laborde.

A Louisiana law entitles those who have served time but are later exonerated to receive compensation. It calls for payments of $25,000 per year of wrongful incarceration up to a maximum of $250,000, plus up to $80,000 for loss of "life opportunities."